The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1908Quotes
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
—Aristophanes, c. 424 BCThe most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
—Herodotus, c. 425 BCIt is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515